Edit This Favorite

Beacon Executive Leadership Institute

An Exciting New Program Series Designed for 21st Century Executives

What will it take to become that person whose phone is buzzing because executive recruiters are seeking you out for key opportunities? Or because your peers want to know why you have become so successful? Or maybe because business publications believe you to be a valuable source of expertise? To compete in the Knowledge Economy, today's executive must be able to thrive in an interconnected and multi-faceted business environment where innovation and paradigm shifts are happening exponentially faster and transform entire systems that cut across companies, industries, and whole societies. Because Beacon is fundamentally organized to understand what factors affect the professional lives of our members and how to use knowledge of those factors to help each other, Beacon is launching a new program series, the Executive Leadership Institute. Its purpose is to engage and equip senior executives with key skills, abilities and competencies needed in a 21st century dynamic economy that demands excellence in managing complex relationships, critical thinking and superior strategic leadership abilities.

Increasingly, we observe that CEO's are hiring knowledge the way they approach "just in time" inventory: hiring the knowledge sets they may need on a contract, shorter term basis rather than assuming that human capital needs can be fulfilled through full-time employees alone. Drawing on this important experience, we are involving CEO's in the critical design of what senior executives competing in the future world of work not only need to know, but how they need to package, market, and price their knowledge to be both competitive and accessible to today's economic buyers.

In “The Future of Jobs” report from this year’s World Economic Forum, the top seven skills anticipated in the workforce of 2020 are complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, people management, coordinating with others, emotional intelligence, and judgment and decision making. This analysis is based in the identification of the current Fourth Industrial Revolution, presenting the challenging new dimension of digitization and its impact to employment needs in this century. The Executive Leadership Institute will consider this new perspective to discuss these shifts in workforce needs and tailor a series of program offerings to provide development in these critical areas to participants.

Outline of Curriculum for the Executive Leadership Institute

Based on the compilation of the input from the Design Session in April and the Report from the Beacon/PhillyU Team, the initial Curriculum Design for Workshops has now been drafted, tying the competencies identified by our design team with the key skill sets from the World Economic Forum.

Outcomes of April 14 Session I – Creating the curriculum based on a dynamic conversation with those who know

As the initial stage of designing the curriculum, we created an interactive working dialogue with a select group of professionals in the executive search and recruitment field; CEO's who are evaluating employees and contractors for these competencies because their companies and organizations depend on having the human capital ready to position them for success; and leaders from area corporate universities, who develop industry-specific educational programming and continuously scan the environment for the trends such programs must address. These experts engaged in a facilitated discussion process with faculty of Philadelphia University to share their knowledge and perspectives. By combining these key perspectives from those who hire, evaluate, educate, recruit and manage those who will ultimately be the Institute’s participants, we believe we will create a unique curriculum tailored to our regional needs that is reflective of the common elements that give today’s executive the most competitive edge.

Our participant experts participated in a design session in which they explored the leadership properties of the 21st Century executive, what skills and competencies successful executives exhibit, and what characteristics correlate with executive mastery in creating a nimble, savvy culture that would appeal to qualified applicants in recruiting talent.

So What Did We Learn?

Here's just a small sample of the qualities and competencies our experts identified. (A more complete outline is being compiled and synthesized.)
21st century executives will need to be visionary, lifelong learners who are:

Outcomes-focused

Authentic

Able to create a sense of purpose

Creating followship;

Competent in assessing and acquiring top talent

Comfortable with ambiguity

Constantly reinventing themselves and their organizations

Expert communicators

Open-minded

Change agents able to facilitate creative destruction

Coaches who can help others grow

Politically sensitive

Courageous

Able to see around the corner to what's coming

Global thinkers

....and, in the words of one of our design thinkers, "where ever will we find these people?" This project is designed to help executives assess their own competencies, identify their desired learnings and provide the pathways for achieving them.

In the coming weeks, our teams from Beacon and Philadelphia University as well as our expert advisors will combine the design session thinking, current research and practical experiential knowledge to develop the workshop series curriculum. From the curriculum will emerge the session topics, learning objectives, and identification of the expertise needed to facilitate the learnings. As these are completed, they will be updated on this site and in future announcements and communications.